Lyons: A Myakka feud between newcomer and neighbor

Second-guessing cops is one thing, but it's hard to swallow this guy's story

Tom Lyons

Since I sometimes second-guess cops, let me say right off that Sarasota County sheriff’s deputies now dealing with an east county feud might be handling that non-neighborly dispute just perfectly.

Or not.

I simply don’t know, but I’m glad they have to handle it and I don’t.

One of the neighbors, Alan Roof, says deputies have it all wrong. He has been sending me their reports, which do kind of make him out to be the bad guy. But really, he is just a new homeowner living there near Myakka Valley Trail, just west of Myakka State Park, and he is dealing with a scary and threatening neighbor, he insists.

Roof has a business called The Right Way, which does “concrete leveling,” and he has had that and other small businesses in the Sarasota area for many years, I know, but he says he has always lived in town.

Until now.

To get to his new country house and acreage, he and his wife and their young child sometimes have used a private road that the Sheriff’s Office agrees is half his and half his neighbor’s, and that both have had every right to use.

But Roof has told deputies that the terrible neighbor and his associates have repeatedly faced off with him and threatened him and his wife with horrific violence, at least once at gunpoint. They told him if he ever uses that road again, he is a dead man, and so on, Roof claims.

One man “threatened to rape my wife and gut me like a pig,” Roof told me. “My family is even afraid to go outside.”

Roof says he has done nothing at all to inspire such a hostile reaction aside from being an unwelcome newcomer. He claims he feels like he’s dealing with characters from “Deliverance.”

Problem is, he says, deputies who come out to deal with this stuff seem to be the neighbor’s good-ol-boy pals. Their reports present everything he says like pants-on-fire lies while buying every fiction his neighbor spins, he told me.

Roof is the one now facing charges. And so, he is trying to get the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to intervene, and wants me to get involved, too.

Well, I’m trying. But I have to say I can’t tell who needs help, or what kind.

If Roof is blameless as he claims, deputies aren’t just buying a neighbor’s balderdash. They would have to be making up stories of their own, or at least twisting facts to make him look much like what his neighbor says he is: A hard-drinking, aggressive, well-armed jerk.

In the reports and other court documents, neighbor James P. Blanton paints Roof as prone to purposely block their road, trespass with his tractor on Blanton’s property, and to brandish a metal pipe or threaten to shoot Blanton and his friends, especially when Roof has been drinking.

Blanton also accused Roof of firing a shotgun from Roof’s property onto his, close enough that pellets were heard ripping through Blanton’s trees.

Roof says he has a witness who agrees he was just shooting at possums, and didn’t shoot toward his neighbor’s house or land.

Well, Blanton was away when I called him, but a woman who said she was his adult daughter called me back. She chuckled at Roof’s suggestion that deputies are their old pals.

“We don’t even know any police people,” she said. Or, she corrected, didn’t until they started calling the sheriff’s office all the time about Roof’s drunken and scary behavior.

And the Blantons had nothing to do with the part of the incident on Oct. 6, just after their shotgun report, that ended with Roof’s arrest.

Roof says he was on his mowing tractor on his property that night and was stunned when a deputy yanked him, dangerously, from his tractor seat.

The deputy said Roof had ignored his orders to stop and just looked at him and drove away on the tractor.

Roof’s version: It was pitch dark that night and he had no idea two deputies were there investigating anything until one grabbed his arm and yanked him down.

“Do you really think I’m stumbling around drunk waving pipes at rednecks,” or ignoring deputies’ orders while he was still hoping to get help from them and often called them out himself, Roof asked me.

Well, I can agree that would be really bad judgment.

There was another incident where deputies arrived and announced their presence, and Roof cursed them and threatened to shoot if they didn’t get off of his property.

That, Roof says, was because he had no idea they were deputies. He thought they must be Blanton and his friends.

Really? Even with cop visits such a regular thing of late?

If he is a sober, peaceful, wanna-be good neighbor in a tense spot, Roof certainly is having a tough time. He is the one who now has an injunction ordering him to stay away from his neighbors, and he is the one charged with resisting deputies and with firing that shotgun “over an occupied premise.”

But Roof is set to meet with a sheriff’s lieutenant next week, to talk it all out.

As I said, could be the deputies have had it all wrong, or some of it wrong, or not. I don’t know. If the Sheriff’s Office tells me afterward that the meeting changed minds, about anything, you’ll read it here.

If not, Roof says, he’s going to fight this in court.

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